Constant and Conscious
Margaret Jacobs
7/10 – 9/12, 2021
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born and raised in Northern New York, Margaret Jacobs is an enrolled member of the Akwesasne Mohawk tribe. Recent awards include a 2019 Artist in Business Leadership Fellowship through the First Peoples Fund and a 2018 Rebecca Blunk Fund Award through New England Foundation for the Arts. Jacobs attended Dartmouth College where she received the prestigious Perspectives on Design Award. She has participated in several artist residencies, including at the Vermont Studio Center where she received a Native American Fellowship through the Harpo Foundation. She has shown at numerous galleries and museums throughout the United States including: Shelburne Museum; Fruitlands Museum; Hood Museum of Art; The Iroquois Museum; Boise Art Museum; Frederic Remington Art Museum; The Heard Museum; the Autry Museum of the American West; Museum of Indian Arts and Culture; Abbe Museum; and the Smithsonian Museum to name a few. Her work has been featured in various print and online press including the recent article “11 Native American Artists Whose Work Redefines what it means to be American.”
Franconia Sculpture Park is pleased to present Constant and Conscious, a solo exhibition of 2021 Franconia Visiting Artist Margaret Jacobs (Akwesasne Mohawk) which will open July 10, 2021 in the Mardag Gallery at Franconia Commons. Known for her steel sculpture, powder-coated jewelry, and natural ink drawings, Jacobs incorporates all three approaches to investigate the tension and harmony between the organic and the man-made, often intermingling unexpected and contradictory materials to explore those relationships. Jacobs will be creating new steel work on-site at Franconia that continues her studies which intertwine deep-rooted history and interconnected life cycles of loss and growth along with cultural and familial narratives.
The exhibition will be a continuation of her Old Growth Series which intertwines recognizable ironworkers’ tools with influential plants and objects found in nature. By using and modifying found chain and hardware while incorporating fabricated steel tobacco flowers and leaves, Jacobs imbues these individual pieces with the sense that they contain an old and established history full of adaptation, resilience, and endurance. Combining a visual vocabulary of tools commonly associated with metalwork and medicinal plants, Jacobs intermingles unexpected forms, colors, and materials in this ongoing body of work that explores Mohawk ironworkers and their relationship to steel as a material, the fragility and cyclical complexity of decay and growth in nature, and cultural storytelling elements. The exhibition opens at Franconia Commons on Saturday, July 10, 2021 with a public reception from 4pm-6pm. Constant and Conscious will run until September 12, 2021.
Old Growth Series: Plantain (Detail) by GBH Photography